Simon Phipps of Sun has responded to the recent criticism of Sun's openness, pointing out that even releasing information that they may already have costs a lot of money. "Jonathan asked me to look into this, to ensure we're pursuing an open path across all of Sun, not simply the software group. We take all input seriously, and we can't solve all problems for all parties, but we're committed to doing our best to faithfully engage with all the communities we serve, in the same spirit as the existing Open Source Ombudsman Scheme. With the support of my team and others in the community I'll try to build a new scheme that is fair and transparent."

There is nothing they can do if no documentation exists, or they're legally disallowed to distribute it.

But nowadays open source projects are better sources for hardware documentation, anyways. I remember programming an ethernet driver once, and I had to replicate all the functionality of the Linux code even if they did not make much sense (apparently there are many undocumented bugs, which they've already fixed).